Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popul...ar than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first--rock and roll or Christianity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I would love to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche on a train or boat and to talk with him all night. Incidentally, I don't conside...r his philosophy long-lived. It is not so much persuasive as full of bravura.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

How old the world is! I walk between two eternities.... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, that ...valley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don't want to die!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The almost unexplored Everglades lay close by and with a half- hour's start a man who knew the country was safe from pursuit. As o...ne man cheerfully confided ..., 'A boat don't leave no trail, stranger.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

In France it is rude to let a conversation drop; in England it is rash to keep it up. No one there will blame you for silence. Whe...n you have not opened your mouth for three years, they will think: "This Frenchman is a nice quiet fellow." Be modest. An Englishman will say, "I have a little house in the country"; when he invites you to stay with him you will discover that the little house is a place with three hundred bedrooms. If you are a world tennis-champion, say, "Yes, I don't play too badly." If you have crossed the Atlantic alone in a small boat, say, "I do a little sailing."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Nobody dast blame this man.... For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell yo...u the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back--that's an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you're finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Men are afraid to rock the boat in which they hope to drift safely through life's currents, when, actually, the boat is stuck on a... sandbar. They would be better off to rock the boat and try to shake it loose, or, better still, jump in the water and swim for the shore.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Here was the longest rapid in our voyage, and perhaps the running this was as dangerous and arduous a task as any. Shooting down s...ometimes at the rate, as we judged, of fifteen miles an hour, if we struck a rock we were split from end to end in an instant. Now like a bait bobbing for some river monster, amid the eddies, now darting to this side of the stream, now to that, gliding swift and smooth near to our destruction, or striking broad off with the paddle and drawing the boat to right or left with all our might, in order to avoid a rock.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »